Moderate churches 'hollowed out' as Christian Right’s 'extreme influence' persists

In a survey released in March 2023, Pew Research Center examined Americans' views on different religious groups. Pew found that 27 percent of respondents had a "very" or "somewhat unfavorable" view of evangelicals, while only 10 percent had that view of Mainline Protestants and 6 percent felt that way about Jews.

But the fact that evangelicals fared badly in Pew's survey doesn't mean that they are going away.

In an article published by The New Republic on February 1, journalist Sarah Stankorb compares the visibility of fundamentalist evangelicals to the visibility of non-evangelical Mainline Protestants. And Stankorb stresses that among Protestants, many Mainline churches are struggling.

Stankorb makes her points by referencing the Rev. Ryan P. Burge's new book "The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations Is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us."

"His latest, 'The Vanishing Church,' is about the hollowing out of moderate congregations," Stankorb explains. "It isn't just the heartbreak of his own church's collapse that nags at Burge. It's the broader trends of which his church was one part, making it a data point for how the Christian Right's more extreme influence bifurcated American religion and relationships. Mainline churches, which Burge notes once represented much higher degrees of American political, ideological, and economic mixing, are disappearing as Americans shift to the extremes."

Stankorb emphasizes that 70 years ago — before the rise of the Christian Right —

Mainline Protestant churches were much more prominent than they are now.

"In the 1950s," the journalist explains, "more than half of Americans were associated with Mainline churches, also known as the 'Seven Sisters' of Mainline Protestantism: the United Methodist Church, Episcopal Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, Presbyterian Church (USA), United Church of Christ, American Baptist Church, and Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Burge describes what used to be a common scene: a thriving house of worship with factory workers taking communion right after lawyers and doctors; little kids sitting a row ahead of elders in their nineties; near-even odds of sitting next to a Republican or a Democrat."

Stankorb continues, "Through the 1970s, large swaths of Americans belonged to these Mainline churches, but according to General Social Survey data, that cross-section of Americans has been thinning out for decades. By the early 1990s, only 19 percent of Americans were Mainline Protestants. By 2022, the figure had dropped to 9 percent."

Far-right Christian nationalists, according to Stankorb, are turning many Americans off to religion in general.

"While progressive Christians certainly do still exist in this country," Stankorb observes, "their left-leaning political kin are far more likely to be religiously unaffiliated. As more conservative believers tended to become evangelicals, right-wing Christianity repelled a lot of progressives and moderates from church altogether. The rise of the Religious Right may have grown white evangelicalism, gutted Mainline Protestantism, and started pulling Catholicism further right, but it also 'pushed a growing number of Americans, especially young adults, to no longer align with any religious tradition at all,' Burge writes."

Read Sarah Stankorb's full article for The New Republic at this link.

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